German Exodus From Central and Eastern Europe - The Results

The Results

During the period of 1944/1945–1950, millions of Germans – including colonists brought in Heim ins Reich from across Eastern Europe after the 1939 annexation of western Poland, fled or were expelled – as a result of actions of the Red Army, civilian militia, and/or organized efforts of governments of the reconstituted states of Central and Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were detained in internment camps or sentenced to forced labor, some of them for years. The number of wartime expellees and refugees whose fate could not be ascertained was estimated to be around 2.1 million of the total 3.2 million casualties from all war-related causes, according to two major studies conducted in 1958 and 1965, which were commissioned by the German Bundestag. Many German women were raped (the process of flight and expulsion includes actions taken by the Red Army against German civilians). Private property of the expelled Germans was confiscated. More than 4 million Germans immigrated to Germany from the 1950s to the 1990s, joining the 12 million expellees and refugees.

A German expellees society resource from the mid-1980s, gives the following estimates of the total population transfers as at to date. See Richard Overy's The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich, for a more recent objective tabulation of these figures (right).

The integration of expellees and refugees into German society required great efforts from the 1940s to the 1960s. In some areas, for instance in Mecklenburg, the number of inhabitants doubled as a result of the influx. Other areas, like Bavaria, which had been predominantly Roman Catholic before the war now had to deal with an influx of non-Catholic and non-Bavarian Germans from the East.

The areas from which ethnic Germans escaped or were expelled were subsequently re-populated by nationals of the states to which they now belonged, numbers of whom were expellees themselves from lands further east.